- It's a cliché to say that dying is easy and comedy's hard, but I do enjoy appearing in dramas because I don't have to worry about getting a laugh. I don't want to say that drama is an easy job for me, because it isn't, but it does carry a different set of challenges.
- I'm definitely self-absorbed, otherwise I wouldn't be in this business. But I also live in fear of -- believe it or not -- humiliation. Everything that I do is humiliating even though I've made a living doing it.
- I appreciate people being huge fans of mine but I don't see it. I'm not being humble and I'm not being hard on myself. I'm not even entirely clear on what I do. I know that it's funny but it's hard for me to talk about it like it's an art form.
- [on working on Late Night with David Letterman (1982)] That was really fun, because it was all about making Dave laugh; it wasn't really about making the audience laugh. It was all about coming out there and making sure Dave found whatever you were doing funny. There were plenty of times that I would come out and not necessarily get huge laughs, but Dave would laugh, and I knew that piece worked. And in the end, I think that the audience that was watching Late Night early on, they were seeing things that hadn't been done on TV before, and it was all new, so whether or not it was uproariously funny, I think I at least got points for doing different stuff.
- [on working on There's Something About Mary (1998)] A part that I think anybody could have - it was really funny on the page right away. That was one of those scripts that I read and laughed out loud at, which I rarely do, so I'm fairly certain that anyone could have plugged into the part and just done the lines in the script and gotten laughs. I added the facial blemishes, after I met with Peter Farrelly and Bobby Farrelly, as kind of a running thing, so I guess I feel like I contributed something to it, but with or without the boil on the eyelid, it still was a character just funny on the page. I can't take much credit for that.
- [on working on Dilbert (1999)] It was an unhappy experience only in my performance-I wasn't happy with my performance in it. I'm not crazy about my voice on its own, doing anything. I've done a number of King of the Hill (1997) because I'm friends with Paul Lieberstein, who runs the show, but I'd done a pilot with Larry Charles before Dilbert, and then he called and asked if I'd do Dogbert. I said sure, but I don't like the sound of my voice, and I'm not entirely sure why. I haven't figured that out yet, because I come from a radio family-in essence, my dad made his career in radio, and he has a great voice, but... My theory is that I'm not comfortable isolating one part of whatever it is I do. And my voice, without me moving around and mugging and adding whatever I add to it, I get uncomfortable. I thought it was a fairly lackluster performance... A lot of what I am telling you goes against what people tell me on the street, when they come up to me and tell me, "You were great in this, that, or the other thing." Some times I just walk away baffled about my own feelings. I've come to realize I have my own take on what it is I do. But a lot of people have come up to me and told me that they liked my Dogbert character.
- Cabin Boy (1994) is a flawed movie, and I look back on it with a certain amount of regret in terms of some of the choices that we made, but at the same time, I'm pretty proud of it, and actually happy that it has somewhat of a cult following at this point. The character in that movie, I like. It was basically Freddie Bartholomew from Captains Courageous (1937), and it's sort of funny to watch that movie now, because I start with this sort of pseudo-English accent, and then as the notes came down from the studio, you can actually see the accent starting to diminish throughout the movie. I think I end with hardly an accent at all. But I'm actually proud of the movie.
- [on Get a Life (1990)] Probably the most fun I've ever had, actually, acting. Because it was the perfect extension of the stuff that I'd started to do on Late Night with David Letterman (1982), and when I look back on all my work, it was probably the best possible incarnation of Chris Elliott, of me. Of what I can do. I look back on that actually as my finest work.
- [on working with Charlie Kaufman] At the time, he was very quiet, you know? He was-if it was like Your Show of Shows (1950), he would have been-I guess Neil Simon was the one who used to whisper ideas to Mel Brooks? If he had anybody who would listen to him, he was that. He was very shy and quiet, but always wrote funny stuff.
- [on Kingpin (1996)] They'd sent me Kingpin, I remember, and they had said that they were thinking of me for the Bill Murray role-they had it out to Bill Murray, but they weren't sure if Bill Murray was going to do it. Then they called and said, "Yeah, Bill Murray's gonna do it." And I said "Oh, that's too bad," and then they wrote this other little part for me in the casino, and called me up and flew me out just to do that scene. They were really hardcore fans of mine, and it was fun to work with them just that night, shooting that scene, but then a lot more fun to have more to do in There's Something About Mary (1998).
- I did end up in The Abyss (1989), but I didn't get the part I auditioned for. That was during the 1988 writers' strike, maybe? Maybe there was another one after that, I can't remember. But it was during a writers' strike that I went out and read for the role Todd Graff got, the guy with the little white rat that he carries around on his shoulder. James Cameron liked me and we talked a lot, and then I heard I didn't get the part, and a few weeks later, I got invited down to North Carolina, and he was literally writing my role on legal paper while I was on the set. Handing it to me and saying, "Okay, you're gonna say this, that, and that thing." And I had a great time doing that movie, actually. He was really great to me.
- [on Manhunter (1986)] That was more difficult for me, in a way, just because I felt totally out of place there. I was cast through a casting agent who'd seen some article on me, and had told Michael Mann, "Oh yeah, it would be cool to have him in this movie," I guess. So I knew right from the start, "Oh, I really shouldn't be in this." The Abyss (1989), I could put a little bit of my attitude from Letterman into the character. In Manhunter, I was supposed to be an FBI forensic investigator. And I don't know, I was 23 or 24 at the time, with a giant beard and long, stringy blonde hair-I just didn't look the part. I remember when the movie premiered, I appear in the scene where everybody's putting together the final information that leads to this killer, and the camera panned the table and cut to me, and there was this big blast of laughter from the audience that broke the whole tension of that scene. I can only imagine that Michael Mann was not happy about that.
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